I've been a big fan of FreeBSD since I first acquired 4.4 on 4 CDs. By that point, I had already spent a lot of time in Linux, but I was always put off by its instability and inconsistency. Once I had FreeBSD installed, it felt like a dream. Everything worked the way it was supposed to, and the consistency of its design meant even older documentation would be mostly applicable without having to figure out how my system was different. There is a reason why in the early days of the Internet, a huge portion of servers ran FreeBSD.

But, that was a while ago. Since then, Linux has matured greatly and has garnered a lot of momentum, becoming the dominant Unix platform. FreeBSD certainly hasn't stood still, however. The FreeBSD team has kept current with hardware support, new features, and a modern, performant design.

#/# find /var/db/pkg -type d -name "p5*" | xargs -J % find -type f -name "+CONTENTS" -exec grep -H "5.12" {} \; | grep pm | gtr -s \/ "\n" | grep p5 | sort | uniq | xargs -J % portmaster -d -B -P -i -g % && yell || yell
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I sort of dread the disappearance of +CONTENTS (etc) with the new packaging system (if I understand pkg(ng) fully enough); the seperate directory-as-its-database is much more forgiving to workarounds (pkg won't install conflicts? with v9, one can temporarily mv the old /var/db/pkg directory maybe, move it back...) not to mention the CLI above. It took all of a couple minutes to almost fully upgrade perl 5.12.x to 5.14.4 ... One could say "can't do that in... [other operating system] " and maybe not, if the new pkg(ng) does not have equivalent easily-crafted (pipes, etc) tools.
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Otherwise, reading the first few posts in this thread (when there were just a few yesterday), I re-read them to discern that they were, in fact, generally positive.